What will the grid look like in 6 months?

Yesh it do!

As CEO of THE OTHERLAND GROUP, which resold Arches and many more of the other mountain areas in the Emerald Mountains, I would like to politely disagree. If you check out Arches and the neighbouring mountain sims you will find some very nice castles and other buildings, which really try to "work with the land". You will find platformed builds too, but maybe less than in many other areas of SL.
We bid for those mountain sims, won and resold a lot exactly because we believe in the value of true landscapes vs. "area". They sometimes sell slowly which hits us hard in tier payments. We still do because it is just more fun to work with beautiful non-standard land.

Reading your full story makes me worry if it makes sense (economically) to create extraordinary landscapes. It seems that even those who like such landscapes, prefer to just look at them but for their homes prefer to rent a flat island with some water.

The future looks of Second Life will be determined by a simple democratic process:

Not having paid much attention to the map for a while, I've just looked over to the east - goddam those new sim blocks have just been stuck on, haven't they. They look ridiculous - not only the fairly non-existant terraforming on those new sims by the owners but also the way LL have just butted the 2-sim depth water right up to a straight edge on the rest of the mainland.

Why wait 6 months to see what the grid will look like? It's there on the east and it's nasty.

Be patient. It's an experiment. In 6 months it will probably have morphed into something entirely different in the newer areas of it. (If there are newer areas of it).

What will it look like in 6 months? Something along the lines of, hmm... There? All nice and large lands that are flat with nothing on them, except for sale signs.

Yeah, but the sudden, clinical edge on the main part of the continent won't change, it'll always look ugly

You can certainly tell the difference in quality of terraforming at the moment, hopefully that's one thing that will improve but as much of this new land will be purchased for rental, chances are it will pretty much all remain low, flat and with small canals between the parcels. Or some other uniformist design.

LOL i love those pics XD
Im going to make one now

Just been to have a direct look at how these new bulk sims are joining. First pic is of the end of the Linden parts, before the 2-sim wide water that joins the bulk sims.

Second is how we can expect the wonderful continuity of these sims to be going forward. No that's not a cut and paste job. Yes, that's two sims next to each other

I'm most suprised at the slip-shod way LL have bolted on these bulk sims to the east - I would ofthought they'd have made an effort in the first water sim butting the "old" land to terraform it out properly.

As for the wonderful differing textures. Well, sell in bulk, have no constraints on how that sim can then be textured, and no doubt we can expect more of this.

I think I've got a more accurate picture ...

I don't think so. Overwhelming historical evidence suggests this is far more likely.

Fair enough, and a platformed build can work too... the big castle in Arches, for example. And I'm sorry you took my message as criticism of you, I know you're not responsible for what your customers build on land you no longer own... that's just how LL works things.

But when I went back there was an ugly platform with a prefab house right next to it.

To me, *one* platform build on a mountain like that is too much. And if I could have afforded it, I'd have built something really great there instead of doing the best I could with a flat island. I'd rather have gone with a vertiginous plot, but there's so few of them that there's no way I can afford to get in one one.

If you'd been able to rent me a 4096 at the top of Arches as readily as Alliez could rent me my 4096 in dAlliez Islands, I'd have been all over it. But buying an 8192 was way outside my budget.

Not so. I'd prefer a mountaintop. I spent two days angsting over this choice, it wasn't easy. But when I'm faced with an up front cost equivalent to 8-10 months rent on an island, even that kind of preference isn't enough.

The future looks of Second Life will be determined by a simple democratic process:
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On the topic of mountains, I have two problems with really high mountains as terrain features. Our flying doesn't always work too well well at heights, and, clouds.

Otherwise what are the problems with mountains? I guess they are harder to build on, but that is a solvable problem.

The mountains and valleys between them look great. With a flying aid they are much more fun to fly around in that a flat place is. They make good use the partially impemented vertical dimension. So to see more use of mountains I would say demand a higher limit or the removal of limitation or our flying ability, and let the landowner set how high off the ground the clouds would be.